I asked my local Clinical Commissioning Group (Aylesbury Vale CCG) a question about providing examples of how the public has influenced commissioning in advance of their board meeting in public on Thursday April 10th.
Here is the reply from their clinical leads:
My Question: Can you please give examples of where the
voice, opinions and experiences of patients and the public has influenced
decisions made when commissioning services?
Christine Campling:
We did extensive public consultation on the inter
mountain project by focus groups and questionnaires. There was full support for
changing the range of options on outpatients to a mixture of face to face,
telephone and Skype like consultations. We are currently running questionnaires
on pain clinic projects, as we are redesigning the pain pathway.
Stuart Logan:
We have met with Patient Groups in the South Locality for
their input into Live Well particularly the Haddenham Patient Participation
Group.
We are involving Diabetes UK in the diabetes service
redesign. They will have patients at the Stakeholders meeting in May inputting
into the redesign process from day 1.
Juliet Sutton:
When they were doing a full review of Occupational
Therapy and Speech & Language Therapy services for children, they went out
and spoke to a lot of parents of children using the service. Parents
wanted shorter waiting times, a more responsive service, improved technology
and access to health professionals in settings closer to them e.g schools and
children's centres. All these views were incorporated into the new service
design and there have been great improvements in the service since then. The
children's physiotherapy service is currently under review and once again the
views of parents and carers are being taken into consideration when making
recommendations for service improvements.
We are currently undertaking a review of the services
provided for children with complex needs/disabilities. Parental feedback is a
large part of this process and their comments are being taken very seriously
when planning future more integrated care. Single point of access is a
recurrent theme from the feedback we have received and this will be one of our
main objectives with future recommendations.
Lesley Munro-Faure:
commissioning plans are driven by localities and each
locality has members of the public sitting on them who input into all the
decisions that are made.
My comments:
I had hoped that I might get a list of things the patients & public has said or suggested and a another list showing what the CCG had done as result of the comments from patients.
I had also hoped that I would get examples showing actual changes in how services are commissioned instead I seem to have got examples of consultations & involvement in redesigning services. And there is nothing wrong in seeing examples of patient participation in redesign.
There are examples of good work especially with the work done by the therapy services for children.
The last paragraph of their reply puzzles me. There are three localities in the CCG and I know that one of them does include members of the public in the group. But the other two locality groups consist of clinicians only. Anyway this last paragraph does not give examples of how the public have influenced commissioning.
I will follow up this answer at the board meeting and I will blog about it if anything new is mentioned.